The German Community
of St.Patrick's Parish

By: Hildegard M. Martens

St. Patrick's Church on 131 McCaul Street was built in 1861 for
the Irish Catholics of the city, and apart from a few German
services which were held there as early as 1881, it was not until
1929 that a German-speaking Redemptorist priest from the United
States was appointed to minister especially to the German
Catholics in the City of Toronto. A small congregation of
twenty-eight people gathered at the church on October 6, 1929, and
from that small beginning, the congregation was to grow into a
thriving community over the next few decades.

Most of these early German parishioners were "Volksdeutsche", or
Donauschwaben, who had come to Canada from Hungary, Romania and
Yugoslavia as a result of the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire following World War One. They came from agricultural
villages where mutual aid institutions, such as funeral societies
and credit unions, were common, and these were accordingly also
established in Canada in response to the needs generated by the
depression. In fact, the hardships of the depression served as a
focal point for the establishment of an active community life
during the early years of the congregation.

Anniversary booklets, oral testimonies and ethnic histories tell
us something about the social fabric of this German Catholic
community. It was quite common, for example, for young parents to
have left their small children behind with grandparents in Europe,
and it might take many years before they could be sent to Canada.
During the depression, women were often able to find work more
easily than men, frequently as cleaning women or domestics. The
poverty of the people and the fact that the women were compelled
to work outside the home led to the building of a centre called
the Catholic Settlement House at the back of the church property
in 1930. In addition to providing for school children during
after-school hours, it functioned as a neighbourhood house and a
social and cultural centre. A kindergarten, a library and a hall,
where German and English classes were taught and where theatre
evenings, concerts and dances were held, became part of the
activities of the centre.

After 1934 the Settlement House greatly expanded its range of
activities and the number of people it served largely as the
result of the vitality and energy of a new priest, Father Daniel
Ehman who was reputed to have sparked enthusiasm even among lapsed
Catholics. In 1936 he wrote:

Made visits to 241 homes and contacted 616 persons.
This does not include visits to the sick in homes and
hospitals. 1100 children have been attending the Catholic
Settlement House each month and were divided into various play
and work groups. At the present there are 197 school-age and 54
pre-school age children who are registered with us. On the
average,153 children came to the settlement house daily. In
addition we were able to get jobs for men, women and young
people of up to 100 working days. Dozens of others, we helped
get a permanent job. Families who were in need were given beds,
mattresses and linen. We distributed clothing to many persons,
of which we did not keep a record. We prevented the invalid
marriages of many persons; brought the sick to Catholic homes;
provided lodging for poor and single persons when they had
difficulty with their landlords and also some families, who
were evicted; helped dozens get their citizenship papers, and
others to get sponsorship; in short, we tried on every side to
be all things to others in Christ.

In addition to the Settlement House, a credit union to help
parishioners with major purchases was founded in 1939 and a
funeral society, which helped with burial costs, was established
in 1933. Other organisations, such as the Rosary Society, the Holy
Name Society and the Catholic Youth Organization provided social
and recreational activities for the parishioners. Later, land was
purchased in Richmond Hill where a lodge, swimming-pool, dance
pavilion, tennis-court and baseball diamond were constructed in
order to ensure that outings by young people were still contained
within the parish and that they would not be "lost to Communist
clubs and to inter-marriage with non-Catholics."

The aftermath of World War Two brought a flood of new German
immigrants to Toronto, not only from Rumania, Yugoslavia and
Hungary, but also from Germany and Austria. This influx challenged
St. Patrick's German community to respond to a whole new set of
problems brought on by post- World War Two anti-German feeling and
the poverty and adjustment difficulties of the newcomers. During
these years the community expanded greatly as the credit union
grew to 800 members and English classes were once more in demand.
The combined number of baptisms and marriages climbed from about
eighty in 1950 to 660 in 1957. According to one parishioner, it
was common for some 300 young people to be at the church hall on a
Saturday evening-dancing, playing table tennis, billiards or
bowling. Most lived within walking distance of the parish
hall.

The Redemptorist priests of St. Patrick's played an important
role, not only in creating and maintaining cultural and social
ties among the German Catholics of Toronto, but also in fostering
some norms of the host society. For example, they encouraged
attendance at English classes in the Settlement House hall, and
Father Daniel Ehman was reported to have bought fox-trot records
so that his parishioners would learn to do North American dances,
as well as the traditional German polkas and waltzes. The
formality of the relationship between parishioner and priest was
considerably lessened in Canada, as noted by one parishioner who
related that when she and her brother were first introduced to one
of St. Patrick's priests, the priest had slapped her brother on
the shoulder in greeting, while they had been prepared to kneel
down and say, "Gelobt sei Jesu Christus," as was done in their
homeland.

Two benevolent societies were organised during this period, which
were particularly suited to the needs of the new immigrants. They
were the Kolping Society and the St. Michaelswerk Verband
katholischer Donauschwaben. The Kolping Society of Ontario was
founded in 1954 and modelled after its German counterpart. In
Germany it was originally a society which provided lodging for
travelling journeymen; here in Toronto it served as a benevolent
society for Catholic German tradesmen who came to Canada in the
late 1950s. A review of the membership rolls shows that most
Kolping members were skilled tradesmen: there were stonemasons,
welders, upholsterers, builders, painters, steel workers,
machinists, toolmakers, carpenters, printers, tailors, butchers,
gardeners, watchmakers, bookbinders, barbers and the odd clerk or
accountant. Kolping members helped to find housing and jobs for
newcomers, often meeting them at Union Station when they first
arrived in Toronto. The St. Michaelswerk Verband was started in
1949 primarily to serve the needs of the Donauschwaben whose lands
had been confiscated and who now sought compensation under
Germany's indemnification laws. The organisation was also intended
to preserve their cultural traditions.

The late sixties and the seventies saw the gradual decline of the
German-speaking congregation at St. Patrick's. As early as the
late forties, some of the original members began to leave the area
around the church on McCaul Street and to buy houses in outlying
areas of the city. The later immigrants began moving out of the
city proper in the sixties to buy houses in the suburbs. They
began to attend the Catholic churches, mostly English speaking, in
their new neighbourhoods. The German congregation still exists at
St. Patrick's, but the number of marriages and baptisms performed
has greatly declined, and only on special feast days and
anniversary celebrations is the church well attended .

Organisations, such as the funeral society, the credit union, the
Kolping Society and St. Michaelswerk Verband, have continued but
they no longer attract many new members, particularly young
members. Many of the postwar immigrants have become well off and
acculturated, so that organisations which once had a mutual aid
function have now become largely social. Those that still maintain
a benevolent function have directed their activities to helping
people in other countries. The Catholic Settlement House continues
as a day-care centre for the neighbourhood's children, but the
ethnic composition has changed entirely so that there are almost
no German-speaking children anymore.

In retrospect, it is clear that the community of St. Patrick's
played a very vital part in the lives of German immigrants in
Toronto from the 1930s to the 1950s by helping them cope with the
pain of uprootedness and poverty and by ensuring that they would
be able to fully participate in the affairs of the established
society.